I liked Mr. Tomeoka’s idea of an open-air chapel on a tree-shaded height from which there was a fine view.  It reminded me of the view from an open space on rising ground near the famous Danish rural high school of Askov, from which, on Sundays, parties of excursionists used to look down enviously on Slesvig and irritate the Germans by singing Danish national songs.  Mr. Tomeoka believed in better houses and better food for farmers and in money raised by means of the ko—­“the rules and regulations of co-operative societies are too complicated for farmers to understand.”

I saw the huts of some settlers who had weathered their first Hokkaido winter.  Buckwheat, scratched in in open spaces among the trees, was the chief crop.  The huts consisted of one room.  Most of the floor was raised above the ground and covered with rough straw matting.  In the centre of the platform was the usual fire-hole.  The walls were matting and brushwood.  I was assured that “the snow and good fires, for which there is unlimited fuel, keep the huts warm.”

The railway winds through high hills and makes sharp curves and steep ascents and descents.  There are tracts of rolling country under rough grass.  Sometimes these areas have been cleared by forest fires started by lightning.  Wide spaces are a great change from the scenery of closely farmed Japan.  The thing that makes the hillsides different from our wilder English and Scottish hillsides is that there are neither sheep nor cattle on them.

When the culpable destruction of timber in Hokkaido is added to what has been lost by forest fires, due to lightning or to accident—­one conflagration was more than 200 acres in extent—­it is easy to realise that the rivers are bringing far more water and detritus from the hills than they ought to do and are preparing flood problems with which it will cost millions to cope when the country gets more closely settled.  It is deplorable that, apart from needless burning on the hillsides, the farmers have not been dissuaded from completely clearing their arable land of trees.  On many holdings there is not even a clump left to shelter the farmhouse and buildings.  In not a few districts the colonists have created treeless plains.  In place after place the once beautiful countryside is now ugly and depressing.

FOOTNOTES: 

[232] The word used by people in Hokkaido for the main island, Hondo or Honshu (Hon, main; do or shu, land), is Naichi (interior).

[233] From Aomori on the mainland to Hakodate in Hokkaido is a 50-miles sea trip.  Then comes a long night journey to Sapporo, during which one passes between two active volcanoes.  The sea trip is 50 miles because a large part of the route taken by the steamer is through Aomori Bay.  The nearest part of Hokkaido to the mainland is a little less than the distance between Dover and Calais.